


The house I bought

by ARMEN15



Category: Das Boot (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-04
Updated: 2019-06-04
Packaged: 2020-04-07 18:18:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19090498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ARMEN15/pseuds/ARMEN15
Summary: The misterious love of Forster for everything that is French.This isn't an easy work to write, never before I used the POW of a character who is dark and from the wrong side, but the emphasis Forster puts on the fact he bought the house and the way he wants everything that belongs to his new country suggests me there must be hidden reasons under his choice, interviews with the actor playing him sadly don't give more useful info.





	The house I bought

I bought a house close to the sea.  
Long hours to think in the hospital bed, unable to walk, the wounds hurt, the one in my heart more than the one in my leg.  
I fell in love with the house and paid it, using my private bank account.  
Not a requisition, not a war prize, like other did, taking forcefully what the enemy had, money, jewels, paintings, houses, women.  
I’m a police officer, sixteen years of service, slowly up to the higher ranks, the law is my rule, has always been, war or not.  
Stealing is forbidden, raping is forbidden, killing is forbidden. I made people respect the law, before Germany changed, long before the war.  
Laws in war time are more rigid, I know, and my brow furrowed with each change. My certainties are trembling and I cannot let them fade, grasping to the steady things I see around me. I’m not in the position to object, I follow the rules, the game of chess is larger than my life and the life of the people I control here. All pawns, with the illusion to be the horse.  
And when you’re into the game at a level like mine, you can’t get out. I’ve read the files, seen what happens to defectors and traitors, the secret reports, the dissuasive power and the repercussions on families and friends. That’s why I want to be here, defiled, in Western France, not in Germany or in the Russian hell, where we’re stuck in.  
The German soldiers are getting younger.  
The compulsory recruitment’s age lowers every year and women are called into service for office, hospital and factory jobs.  
The Nazi idea to keep women in the kitchen only is turned upside down, and I’m happy, because I got Simone.

__

Leaving me to bleed until my last breath - setting up the scene like I caught a burglar in her apartment and I got stabbed - to make it appear a normal thief and avoid the vengeance of my men over my death. It’s normal to find me at her place, half the office saw I simply adored her.  
My luck was the neighbour of second floor back from work, I heard steps on the stairs and my cry of help was strong enough to be heard; the face of the man when he saw the blood and my deadly pallor, he vomited in a corner of the kitchen before he had the strength to go for help, he run to the nearby hospital to get a doctor. The short distance saved me.  
Simone’s not a killer, not like her ruthless lover, ready to create a bomb and destroy everything on her path. Destruction, confusion, damages, I hate them with all my life.  
Simone’s got her brother back, alive, apparently a true hero, braver than me. Maybe telling her he’s alive saved my life, she had again someone to care about.  
The resistance cell is destroyed, it won’t change the fate of the war.  
The losses in lives, villages, boots, the waste fields, the crops that cannot grow, the children who are starving.  
London resisted to the blitz and the Americans are in the game now. The plans aren’t going weel, Gluck is pessimistic.  
A dark cloud loaming over the horizon, a raven’s sing I want to silence.  
The restaurants in La Rochelle are full of people with big purses who take profit from the war economy. The black market is flourishing: oysters come from the sea fields, bottles of champagne are safe inside the underground caves. We had the parade in Paris, the day we entered, I saw the cine news, the pomp and the pride, all the people along the streets waving their hands to our soldiers.  
I promised her coffee. Civilians are in shortage of everything. That’s not how life should be, still it is so. And I want the war to end, to move in my new house, the one I bought close to the sea, to read my books and buy fresh fish from the boats.  
__

I bough the old house with its original furniture and I paid an extra price for them. Someone else lived here, left traces engraved in scratched on the chairs and signs on the wooden floor. The books on the shelves are made of thin and fragile sheets, ex libris with various names. Josephine. Mathieu. Marie Louise. They lived there, in happiness or sorrow I’ll never know.  
My dream is a quiet life in this country, walking along the endless coast, observing the eternal waves of the ocean. The beaches are sheltered, the water isn’t deep, I imagine to teach our children to swim.  
A need to change scenery for me, Germany has improved a lot, we’ve risen after the previous war, I remember my father giving a coin to the soldiers begging on the streets in Munchen.  
Without a hand, a leg, a part of the face: my father was at Ypres, he saw what the gas did.  
When I had to choose my future, he had quite a premonition: a policeman risks, a soldier dies, he told me. And I studied to become an investigator, young and determinate to find the criminals.  
The new government is good, our economy is strong again, new jobs, new factories, my brother writes the Ruhr is a mass of burning flames now, producing for the war.  
It is a privilege for a police officer to be included in the Gestapo. One impossible to refuse. The best were chosen, and my ability, my methodical attitude, my high case solving rate put me in the spot. And I had been to Paris in my youth so I volunteered for a French assignment, it was the western front I longed for.  
The dream is fading away, the frame is slowly invaded by a invisible fog that blurs everything.

 

__

When Simone accepted my kiss and kissed me back, mouth open, fingers in my hair, I was in heaven. I wanted to linger in our embrace, taste her lips, forget the hunt and the war, my fears and doubts and the mask of rigid professionalism I wear with the rest of the world.  
She pulled me toward her room, her hands under my jacket, letting it fall on the floor, then on my belt, all the while throwing away her shoes, her coat, her gown.  
On her bed, in a frantic hurry, half naked and ready and I was lost inside her, around her, the urge, the instinct, such a long time without a woman.  
I know the town brothels, know them all, where soldiers go, where officers hide. The unspoken agreement with the “Madames” and the punishment for the soldiers who are too rude.  
We’re men, not saints, away from home, with man’s needs; I repressed mine for a long time, because I wanted my own woman, the one to have a future with.  
Walking between the secretaries’ desks I felt their eyes. The awareness to be a good catch, an interesting prey, don’t bother me; Jutta - and Christine after her - were eager to end up in bed with a chief, the signs were evident. A brief touch passing sheets, a glance, drops of perfume. Was I afraid and bothered to be considered same level as those going to the brothels?  
I was drawn to Simone, simply, planning a classic elegant courtship, behaving like a gentleman, until she showed me that who I am is the problem, the Gestapo chief of just a man? Can I admit to my self I want her, in a desperate way, to give me the strength to enter her house and invade her, body and mind?  
Simone is divorced, not a virgin, her boldness in bed is a mirror of her strong personality; I like it, a shy girl is not my match.  
After the first release, I lied on my back, painting hard, keeping her hand in mine; then she turned to me and caressed my face, unbuttoned my shirt and the signs of desire started again, I took off all her clothes, to admire her body in full beauty, to caress her and make love again, slower.  
And I fell into the night spent, sated, the best sleep I had since the war started.  
I should have understood something wasn’t right from how she reacted when I went down on her, my face between her tights. Her pleasure had been intense, more than when I was inside her, but I didn’t care, I wanted her to feel good, fuck the myth of the Aryan alpha male. staying in France is changing me, the decadence of the enemy is appealing the part of me I keep secret; I want to learn French, I want her to teach me French, so when it’s all over I’ll be Monsieur Hagèn and not Major Forster.  
The reasons to stay here are getting more and more complicated for me, I barely can admit them to myself. 

__

My enemy, my rival for her affection. Carla Monroe.  
I studied her photo from the case file, dark hair, to pass easily as a French girl, a common face, if not for her eyes.  
When she approached us on the streets, a bold move, her eyes caught my attention.  
What can Simone love in a woman?  
It’s abnormality, deviation, was she tricked into it or in search of danger and excitement?  
Her marriage lasted seventeen months only, he was often drunk, was that the divorce cause?  
Was he violent with her, submitting her in bed, forcing her to have intercourse?  
I should read Freud again, he stated different sexual preferences are not a illness, that we all are potentially bisexual. He wrote also about lesbians, I’ll find again the part. His books are forbidden now, I can keep them for work purposes, homosexuality isn’t allowed in Germany now, still voices run, in my position I learn lots of things, I remember strange behaviours between a few students attending University with me.  
Simone had her pleasure, it wasn’t rape, still should I question my ability as a lover and my maleness, now, or how feelings can win over beliefs?  
Logic and rationality are losers in a battle where heart rules us. .  
Monroe knew I’d give her the final shoot, she pleaded me to so do with her eyes. It was mercy, I could have keep her alive, for a questioning, let her die later, under torture, but in doing so how could I ever look Simone in the eyes again? 

 

__

I’ll never try to buy Simone. The necklace, a clumsy idea, how goofy, because she deserve the best I can offer, my purpose she tries new things, to consider me a good man.  
I’m respected here, my orders are harsh but with a logic underneath them.  
Duval knows me, we’ve worked together for a year now, we’re two policemen.  
He’s been defeated as a French man, not as a detective. He’s good, really clever.  
He noticed before me what I was denying myself, that the mole is inside my office, inside me. I am the mole.  
I am the blind man that let himself fall in love.  
The weak man: loneliness, distance, responsibilities played hard on me.  
What took control over me on the kitchen floor was a force I prefer to ignore. A stupid, impulsive vengeance, forgetting I was already exposed, stripped naked. Gluck and Duval saw what I felt for Simone, I could not let it pass as a fake infatuation with the purpose to discover the cell. And her brother , why he was in contact with them? Why? I wanted to make Simone forget that woman, to mark her with my body, my touch and my scent. The pounding in my heart silenced the voice of reason.  
Betrayed and desperate, betrayed and cursed.  
Betrayed by love.  
Betrayed because Simone betrayed both her lovers, Monroe died for a tip, I recognize the calligraphy by memory now. How I haunted Simone, all the more after we made love. The policeman in me reduced the lover to silence.  
I still wanted to forgive Simone, she gave me Gluck and there was no need to sacrifice the hostages. An escalation of death that goes against my effort to keep things quiet here. At the morgue I’d take her again in, grabbing her hand like the sand flowing from my fingers while the tide retreats.  
I deserved her stab, the blood that left me and the pain that filled me at his place.  
The need to destroy the resistance cell and in doing so destroying myself fill the equation, all was done to serve the justice and save the lives of one, two, three hundreds people.  
Duval tells me I’m a hero now, and letting the rest of the hostages go will make me respected and feared all the more; still, I’m just a weak man, alone with a hole in my leg and a house too big along the beach.  
Simone’s gone, after saving me or those people, I’ll never know. And I’ll never want to know.


End file.
